Recovering from Pinguin Penalty
-
We have big issue with a website who has been hardly penalized by Pinguin on october 4th. After a lot of try to remove bad links and sending two disavow files, none of our actions has improved our situation. We're wondering if this solution might be good :
-
changing the domaine name
-
Keeping the same content
-
Not using Webmaster tools and redirect 301 and wait until the site will be fully indexed
-
Build new links
Please tell us your opinion and solution.
Thanks
-
-
If you have tried to contact the web masters of the sites containing links on and have had no response you need to disavow these links.
-
Hello,
Thanks for your collaboration on my topic.
If "manuel penalty in my webmaster toosl" mean that i've received a message from webastertools the answer is no. If it's not please clarify your question.
About your second question, we've look into all our external links and removed a lot of them. Obviously, many directories are simply not answering our demands. So we 100 % sure that few toxic links still remain.
-
Hi,
did you get a manual penalty in your web master tools? Also have you re checked your external link profile for toxic links ?
Thanks,
Mark
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is There Such Thing as Minor Penalties or Restrictions?
Hello Mozzers So generally its said that when a site receives a penalty from Google - it's obvious - you can't miss it... But does google apply minor penalties (say dropping 5-10 places for one not so great link) One particular campaign we've been working pretty hard - really great stuff - all white hat techniques - but there were a couple of links I wasn't 100% sure on - but got them any way as I guessed that the effect of them, if not positive, would be neutral at worse... (The sites wen't obvious spam sites but just seemed 'not great') Recently after, we dropped around 8 place for our main keyword ranking. It's not a very competitive space. Is this likely just standard inexplicable fluctuation, or is there such thing as minor penalties or restrictions? Cheeers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wearehappymedia0 -
Got Google Manual penalty full Spam on my website
Here are Moz Metrics: http://prntscr.com/as3fp6 Site Url: www.financialprospect.com DA- 40 PA- 48 Spam Score - 0 RD- 68 Links No Loss in Backlink Profile I think my site is having much more spun content so can you suggest me the ways to re-index my site? How can i get my site back to google? Can you suggest any tool which give number of links already spun and then we may delete those posts. Looking for positive reply...!!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | morisshibu1 -
Recovering from Black Hat/Negative SEO with a twist
Hey everyone, This is a first for me, I'm wondering if anyone has experienced a similar situation and if so, what the best course of action was for you. Scenario In the process of designing a new site for a client, we discovered that his previous site, although having decent page rank and traffic had been hacked. The site was built on Wordpress so it's likely there was a vulnerability somewhere that allowed someone to create loads of dynamic pages; www.domain.com/?id=102, ?id=103, ?id=104 and so on. These dynamic pages ended up being malware with a trojan horse our servers recognized and subsequently blocked access to. We have since helped them remedy the vulnerability and remove the malware that was creating these crappy dynamic pages. Another automated program appears to have been recently blasting spam links (mostly comment spam and directory links) to these dynamically created pages at an incredibly rapid rate, and is still actively doing so. Right now we're looking at a small business website with a touch over 500k low-quality spammy links pointing to malware pages from the previously compromised site. Important: As of right now, there's been no manual penalty on the site, nor has a "This Site May Have Been Compromised" marker in the organic search results for the site. We were able to discover this before things got too bad for them. Next Steps? The concern is that when the Penguin refresh occurs, Google is going to notice all these garbage links pointing to those malware pages and then potentially slap a penalty on the site. The main questions I have are: Should we report this proactively to the web spam team using the guidelines here? (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en&pli=1) Should we request a malware review as recommended within the same guidelines, keeping in mind the site hasn't been given a 'hacked' snippet in the search results? (https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/4598410?hl=en&ref_topic=4596795) Is submitting a massive disavow links file right now, including the 490k-something domains, the only way we can escape the wrath of Google when these links are discovered? Is it too hopeful to imagine their algorithm will detect the negative-SEO nature of these links and not give them any credit? Would love some input or examples from anyone who can help, thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Etna0 -
A client/Spam penalty issue
Wondering if I could pick the brains of those with more wisdom than me... Firstly, sorry but unable to give the client's url on this topic. I know that will not help with people giving answers but the client would prefer it if this thread etc didn't appear when people type their name in google. Right, to cut a long story short..gained a new client a few months back, did the usual things when starting the project of reviewing the backlinks using OSE and Majestic. There were a few iffy links but got most of those removed. In the last couple of months have been building backlinks via guest blogging and using bloggerlinkup and myblogguest (and some industry specific directories found using linkprospector tool). All way going well, the client were getting about 2.5k hits a day, on about 13k impressions. Then came the last Google update. The client were hit, but not massively. Seemed to drop from top 3 for a lot of keywords to average position of 5-8, so still first page. The traffic went down after this. All the sites which replaced the client were the big name brands in the niche (home improvement, sites such as BandQ, Homebase, for the fellow UK'ers). This was annoying but understandable. However, on 27th June. We got the following message in WMT - Google has detected a pattern of artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site. Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank are violations of Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | GrumpyCarl
As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to xxxx.co.uk/. There may be other actions on your site or parts of your site. This was a shock to say the least. A few days later the traffic on the site went down more and the impressions dropped to about 10k a day (oddly the rankings seem to be where they were after the Google update so perhaps a delayed message). To get back up to date....after digging around more it appears there are a lot of SENUKE type links to the site - links on poor wiki sites,a lot of blog commenting links, mostly from irrelevant sites, i enclose a couple of examples below. I have broken the links so they don't get any link benefit from this site. They are all safe for work http:// jonnyhetherington. com/2012/02/i-need-a-new-bbq/?replytocom=984 http:// www.acgworld. cn/archives/529/comment-page-3 In addition to this there is a lot of forum spam, links from porn sites and links from sites with Malware warnings. To be honest, it is almost perfect negative seo!! I contacted several of the sites in question (about 450) and requested they remove the links, the vast majority of the sites have no contact on them so I cannot get the links removed. I did a disavow on these links and then a reconsideration request but was told that this is unsuccessful as the site still was being naughty. Given that I can neither remove the links myself or get Google to ignore them, my options for lifting this penalty are limited. What would be the course of action others would take, please. Thanks and sorry for overally long post0 -
Footer Link in International Parent Company Websites Causing Penalty?
Still waiting to look at the analytics for the timeframe, but we do know that the top keyword dropped on or about April 23, 2012 from the #1 ranking in Google - something they had held for years, and traffic dropped over 15% that month and further slips since. Just looked at Google Webmaster Tools and see over 2.3MM backlinks from "sister" compainies from their footers. One has over 700,000, the rest about 50,000 on average and all going to the home page, and all using the same anchor text, which is both a branded keyword, as well as a generic keyword, the same one they ranked #1 for. They are all "nofollows" but we are trying to confirm if the nofollow was before or after they got hit, but regardless, Google has found them. To also add, most of sites are from their international sites, so .de, .pl, .es, .nl and other Eurpean country extensions. Of course based on this, I would assume the footer links and timing, was result of the Penguin update and spam. The one issue, is that the other US "sister" companies listed in the same footer, did not see a drop, in fact some had increase traffic. And one of them has the same issue with the brand name, where it is both a brand name and a generic keyword. The only note that I will make about any of the other domains is that they do not drive the traffic this one used to. There is at least a 100,000+ visitor difference among the main site, and this additional sister sites also listed in the footer. I think I'm on the right track with the footer links, even though the other sites that have the same footer links do not seem to be suffering as much, but wanted to see if anyone else had a different opinion or theory. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | LeverSEO
Jen Davis0 -
Can i 301 redirect a website that does not have manual penalty - but definetly affected by google
ok, i have a website (website A) which has been running since 2008, done very nicely in search results, until january of this year... it dropped siginificantly, losing about two thirds of visitors etc... then in may basically lost the rest... i was pulling my hair out for months trying to figure out why, i "think" it was something to do with links and anchor text, i got rid of old SEO company, got a new SEO company, they have done link analysis, trying to remove lots of links, have dissavowed about 500 domains... put in a reconsideration request... got a reply saying there is no manual penalty... so new seo company says all they can do is carry on removing links, and wait for penguin to update and hopefully that will fix it... this will take as along as it takes penguin to update again... obviously i can not wait indefinetely, so they have advised i start a new website (website B)... which is a complete duplicate of website A. Now as we do not know whats wrong with website A - (we think its links - and will get them removed) my seo company said we cant do a 301 redirect, as we will just cause what ever is wrong to pass over to website B... so we need to create a blank page for every single page at website A, saying we have moved and put a NO FOLLOW link to the new page on website B.... Personally i think the above will look terrible, and not be a very user friendly experience - but my seo company says it is the only way to do it... before i do it, i just wanted to check with some experts here, if this is right? please advise if 301 redirects are NOT correct way to do this. thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | isntworkdull
James0 -
Is this Penguin or Manual Penalty?
I have a client that's traffic dropped off on April 10th. They did get a message in GWT on March 21st. The April 10th date leads me to believe that it is a manual penalty and couldn't be penguin since penguin was released on April 24th. I guess either way backlinks need to be cleaned up though.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RonMedlin0 -
When to give up on a website with a Google penalty?
I recently had a Google 60 penalty hit my website. The main two issues were that I had a person helping me with SEO and they bought some links. The second issue is that I own about 90 URL's in the my vertical. I created about 60 one page sites for these keyword targeted domains. I then linked these sites to main site. Big mistake! I kept these URL's all on the same server as my main site. In October 2010 I noticed my site hits dropped dramatically. I started looking for the issue. I didn't know which issue caused the penalty. I fixed both issues in November 2010 and asked Google for reconsideration in early December 2010. I kept link building for my site by finding quality links.I was extremely honest with Google. I gave them all of the domains I own and I told them the name of the person that bought links for me and the websites where those links were placed. As of late February 2011 a Google search for my domain still showed up in approximately the 64th position. I recently asked Google again to lift the penalty. I basically told them that I fixed all of my issues that led to the penalty and let them know I have been waiting for almost 3 months. I told them I have put the past 2 years of my life into this website and begged them to forgive me. I also asked them to let me know if my site was never going to be forgiven? I got the typical canned response from the Google team. As of today the penalty is still in effect. I just want to know when you should give up on a site. I have spent about $20,000 on this site and about 2 years of hard work. I don't want to give up, but I don't want to keep putting my hard work and time into the site if it will never escape the dreaded Google penalty. Do you think I should continue to wait and if so how long? Anything else I can do to persuade Google to release me from this penalty hell? If I do abandon the site and start from scratch what steps should I take? Do I need a new server? What if any content can I take from my current site and transfer to the new site? If I can how do I do this without getting another penalty or lose the credit for the original content. I created about 2,000 pages of original content for this site. I'd love to be able to transfer this content if I have to start from scratch. Any ideas or detailed help plans would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tadden0
